Wednesday, October 22, 2014

timewarp cults at the movies





Any cop then, Northern Soul?

In the trailer I sense some hints of bro-huggy, buzzed-up energy that feel suspiciously like a retro-fitting of the 70s with post-rave Brit mores (and perhaps also post-clubbing movies like Human Traffic).... I wonder if they have managed to catch the slowness and inertia of England in the early 70s.... or the strangely sour fanaticism that characterises all stages of the mod / soulboy continuum

The film involves a sort of doubling of nostalgia -- a 70s-recreation about a 70s scene that repeated / suspended-in-perpetuity the mid-60s

The trailer's sales pitch kicker is "if you weren't there, you'll wish you had been" - which effectively means "if you weren't there, you'll wish you had been - when you'd have been, er, wishing you were where / when you weren't"!

Just as retro depends on the existence at one point of the new, the non-retro, likewise nostalgia has to be for periods that were unmarked by nostalgia.... the definition of a golden age is that it's not harking back to a prior golden age, surely

Perhaps this explains why there haven't been hardly any films about timewarp cults and tribal revivals...  neither period drama flashbacks nor movies documenting or drama-tising the revival as it happens in real-time

These are the only really trad jazzy bits of It's Trad, Dad! (Dick Lester's first foray into popsploitation movies, I believe) I could find -- the other clips are from the non-trad bits like Chubby Checker added to the pic as it was being made and as they realised that the trad boom was going phut





This is about the original subcult but was instrumental in a revival of it, so....



Any movies about, or even involving Deadheads?


Here's a nearly 20 year old doc about the Decade-based tribe That Style Forgot



Not really on topic but here's a whole film about the London Rock 'n 'Roll Show, the rock'n'roll nostalgia extravaganza at Wembley  in 1972


2 comments:

Bollops said...

No idea about the film but I'll take any excuse to post a link to 'Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqBrAFPG-DE

(The Fall, 1981)

Fernando Ramírez Ruiz said...

3D printers and retromania makes me think Neal Stephenson got something right about the future in his novels. In The Diamond Age, the one I have read, things get manufactured with a system kind of like 3d printing, and people instead of being divided in countries are grouped in phyles kinda like tribes, but the funny thing is this phyles, at least some of them, identify with some historic period and pretend to live in it. The leading phyle are the "Victorians".